Band Ane

Anish Music

There’s a shortage of electronicalistas out there. Happily, Denmark’s Ane Oestergaard is a good one, and Anish Music is animated and inventive. She likes to work with clicks and ticks and scrapes and bits of fudgey electronic backwash, alternately pricking and smashing. She darts at you, shakes a rattle in your face, then hops backward into a hum. Parts of “Lala” are a little like Björk’s murmured Vespertine, but this is a Vespertine in which the soft background flesh-noises have been sharpened and turned up until they occupy the foreground of the tune, while Donna Dalhoff’s minimal singing sinks to the middle. During “Wood Delivery”, Oestergaard establishes a serene run of piano notes and then layers it with vibrations and oily purrs that sound like a phone going off. “Atmos Halioss” bubbles along lightheartedly until the lightness is chopped apart by robotic moaning. Every time it tries to come back, she breaks its spirit all over again. Anish Music sounds like the work of a woman who used to pull her dolls to bits as a girl and poke around inside. She’s restless and inquisitive and can’t leave things alone—she’s compelled to fiddle. The album bobs along under the power of this toylike spirit. It’s whimsy without the mush.